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Today’s agenda – we’re going to talk about the power of negative keyword targeting and go through some advanced strategies for identifying and adding negatives to your ad groups

Negative keyword targeting can be the single most powerful strategy in optimizing your paid search performance on Google AdWords.

Here’s why you need negative keywords. Similar to any other media buy, you want to target the right audience and exclude the wrong audiences.

But on AdWords, you actually get rewarded for better relevancy. With better relevancy, you improve CTR. CTR is the main factor that drives your Quality Score, so as your QS increases, your CPCs will get lower.

example for each, have some facts, mapped out discount you get if you have QS 7-10 (find from Larry), landing page, relevancy,

Quality Score is comprised of landing page load times, landing page relevancy, ad copy relevancy, and most importantly CTR. CTR is the main factor that drives your Quality Score as this is Google’s way of making revenue.

Based on this chart of discounts, you should strive to have at least a QS of 7, and any QS of 8 or higher works in your favor. If you have a QS of 6 or lower, you know you’re in trouble and should employ negative keywords to get that QS back up.

Adding Negatives Based on Raw Queries

you’re already paying for these keywords. so it’s hurting your QS – you’ll want to think of ways to tackle negative keywords in a more proactive way.

So today I’m going to go over some advanced strategies and hacks that will help better employ negative keywords to you shape your traffic and lower your CPCs. We all know you can brainstorm negative product lists – that’s a given and should always be done. But that’s very time consuming and your manual brainstorm will likely fail to encompass the entire list of possible negative keywords. So let’s take a deep dive into some innovative negative keyword strategies that will help you make better ppc decisions and optimize your traffic and ad spend.

Generally the keyword planner is used to expand your targeted keywords. However, a strategy for negative keywords is to use the keyword planner and identify the most irrelevant keywords that come up related to your keyword search

This strategy is a bit of a hack trick to use reverse psychology on Google. So what you do here is conduct a search for a keyword you want to target or that you’re already targeting. Google will provide you a list of keywords that are closely related to that keyword so you can expand on it. Take this list of keywords, and identify all of the keywords that are irrelevant to your ad group and add those as negative keywords.

In this example here, let’s say one of the keywords you’re targeting is engineer but you’re primarily interested in software engineers – you can see here that mechanical engineering, civil engineering and structure engineer are getting medium to volume and should be added to your negatives list while you’re building out your target keyword list as well.

use engineer example, zoom in screenshot

the next strategy that I’ll cover are match-type silos, which will help you shape traffic better for the given ad groups you have set up

These are the three different types of negative match types available on google.

If you are targeting the same keyword with the different match types in your ad groups of your campaign, Google could often trigger the wrong match type for the user query.

This is where match-type siloes come in.

With Match-type silos, it guarantees proper ad serving based on the user query. I’ll show you an example on the next slide.

But additionally, match-type silos allows you to test the different targeting types (broad, phrase, and exact match). The data you’ll receive from the different targeting types will help you figure out budgets and bids for specific match types.

In this example, the keyword we’re targeting in our different ad groups is black shoes.

For each particular ad group, to implement match-type silos, you’ll add a negative for the same keyword but a different match type. For broad matches, you’ll add a negative of phrase match, and for phrase matches you’ll add a negative for exact match.

This may seem like a daunting process to do for every single ad group so you can get started with the high volume keywords to keep things manageable. This can easily be done with a spreadsheet.

After implementing match-type silos, as a result your ads will be served for the proper queries and reporting for the various match types will be more precise.

The last strategy that we’ll go over is what to watch out for with negative keywords on the different networks. Negative keywords on Google differ from negative keywords on Bing so we’ll go over these differences and explain what you need to do to make sure you’re properly executing negative keywords across both search engines.

Like we covered, these are the different negative match types available on Google.

A common misconception with Google Negative keywords is that negative broad match work the same as broad match keywords. However, this is not the case. Google is really vague in their documentation but they do say that singular or plural versions of your negative keywords may still serve your ad for broad match negative keywords – so in this example. company vs. companies

You can see that ads may still show for queries that contain “companies” even if you are using negative keywords in the singular form.

so make sure to add negative keywords of the plural and singular versions of the keywords.

On Bing, their negative match types differ slightly from Google. They do not have broad negative keywords types so this may affect you in some scenarios where you have more than one word in your negative keyword.

Here’s an example. Say you’re a local college but you don’t offer online courses. On Google you can use the broad match negative keyword online degrees and your ads won’t show for these three queries.

In order to have the same result on Bing, you would need to add multiple negative phrase match keywords.

Add some social stuff – seeing these strategies playout

twitter has negative keyword li has exclusion fb has exclusion trim the fat from your lists of targeting

On LInkedIn, you can target a category, and exclude certain titles – if we go back to the engineering example. We can exclude civil and mechanical engineering if I want to target all kinds of other engineers.

Example of keyword and negative keyword targeting on Twitter. You can use the similar strategy here using their keyword expansion solutions as ways to find negative keywords.

On FB, they let you exclude specific audiences, so you can exclude a custom audience based on people who have already visited your site, or connections like those who’ve already liked your page.

Using Negative Keywords To Amplify Positive Results By Sahil Jain

2.
#SMX #14B2 @sahilio
About me
Co-founder and CEO of AdStage
• Co-founded first company, YC & SV Angel backed Trigger.io at 20.
• Dropped out of UC Berkeley to join AOL Corp Dev. at 19.
• Dropped out of High School to join Yahoo! Mobile at 17 and worked
in the professional video game industry before that
Sahil
Jain

3.
#SMX #14B2 @sahilio
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